Sony's Glasses-Free 3D Sheet Brings A New Dimension To Laptops

Sony loves 3D. There's no shock there. So it should be no surprise that now, Sony has announced that they'll be releasing a sheet that "enables a notebook PC to display 3D images that can be viewed with the naked eye without using special glasses."

The sheet was demonstrated on the Series S of VAIO notebooks, a 15.6" machine that looked fairly normal save for a cover that slipped atop the face. Reports suggest that it will go commercial in October, but it's unclear just how many notebooks it may ship on, or if it can be fitted onto non-Sony machines. The sheet is just 3mm thick, and of course it requires no glasses to view. The glasses-free approach relies on a parallax barrier, so users will need to eye it in a sweet spot, but the sheet will come with a software app that "uses the Web camera of the notebook PC to determine the position of the user's face and adjusts 3D images so that the user can see optimal 3D images at the position."

At just under $200, it's hard to think that too many folks will be picking this up as an impulse buy, but the world has yet to see the possible popularity of glasses-free 3D.